When in doubt, one man from Sarasota chilled out

Wednesday

Palm Avenue gallery owner Rainer Scheer, the man behind the "Chillounge" street party, set his sights on building an event that would be casual, elegant and tropical -- Sarasota staples, each.

Palm Avenue gallery owner Rainer Scheer had no patience for sitting behind his desk as the real estate market plummeted, waiting for somebody to walk in and buy a fresco.

So he started thinking about throwing the kind of event that would bring a flood of people to Palm Avenue. And he started planning a party that would be casual, elegant and tropical -- three qualities people look for when they come to Sarasota.

"I had a vision and I tried to put the vision in a picture and deliver it," says Scheer, 47.

Two years later, the fresco market shows scant signs of rebounding. But Scheer has carved out a franchise for himself as the promoter and host of Chillounge Night, a series of outdoor parties that he started on Palm Avenue, expanded to Tampa and St. Petersburg and will push into new markets in Orlando and Boca Raton in 2010.

The signature feature of Chillounge is the furniture -- six truckloads of expensive outdoor lounge chairs, canopy-covered daybeds and settees that are deployed all around a park or streetscape, creating little living rooms where people can mingle.

Live jazz, a fashion show, an opera performance and a sexy Brazilian Samba parade are among the half-dozen entertainment acts he books, in sets of 30 minutes to an hour, quick shows that keep the party moving.

And Scheer tries to keep the cover charge low, usually $20, so more people can afford it.

The first Chillounge Night, in February 2008, drew 2,100 people to Palm Avenue. The smallest party draw so far was 900 in Fort Myers, which Scheer attributes to a horrendous local economy that has branded Lee County the foreclosure capital of America.

The second annual Chillounge Night in St. Petersburg, held last month, drew 3,400.

As he talks about pushing into even more distant markets in the future, he is proud and stressed -- five events in 2010, after all, means he has a 500 percent greater chance of having a party rained out (something that has not yet happened).

Rain insurance costs more than $8,000; instead, he invested in plastic covers for the lounge chairs.

If 2010 goes perfectly, Scheer will add three more dates, for a total of eight parties. That includes three parties in a six-week period.

It took him five months to put together the first Chillounge Night.

"There are so many details," says Scheer, who moved from central Germany to West Florida seven years ago. "It is easier to show people what I did in the past two years, but times are tough. You still have to sell it."

And that means driving his Chrysler minivan back and forth across Florida as he assembles the sponsorships, alliances with nonprofit groups, and all the other connections he needs to draw 2,000 people in each town.

A lounge leap

A former salesman of computers and fashion accessories, Scheer knew enough about marketing to envision his audience -- well-to-do partygoers in their 30s, 40s and 50s -- and he bent every detail to attract the kind of people he wanted.

It started with a look. And a name, coined by Scheer, who was thinking chill as in "chill out" and lounge as in "lounge furniture."

Early on, in the summer of 2007, Scheer hired an artist to paint the Chillounge Night he was picturing in his mind.

"He had a very good idea of how he wanted things to look prior to the event actually happening," said Matteo Caloiaro, the artist who drew the watercolors. "He knows what he wants. He could look at my sketch and immediately tell me if it was something he was going for."

Scheer posted Caloiaro's watercolors on his Web site, and filled an attache case with them so he could show them to potential sponsors.

"I could tell that this was a different special event than any other special event that we had sponsored," said John Saputo, owner of Gold Coast Eagle Distributing. "It was very upscale. It was very trendy. He was taking some themes of the Caribbean and South America that were different than most of the themes I had seen in a lot of special events in Florida."

Saputo says the marketing demographic was a perfect fit for Stella Artois and Michelob Ultra, two of the beers he distributes. Saputo, the two beer companies and Scheer negotiated a sponsorship that included cash and in-kind contributions to Chillounge, in exchange for marketing and VIP passes.

It was one of 28 sponsorships that Scheer negotiated.

But when it came time to spend tens of thousands of dollars on all that lounge furniture (no suitable rentals could be found), Scheer was on his own.

He traveled to Jakarta, Indonesia, and visited two factories in late 2007. The party was three months away and barely beginning to take shape when Scheer put down the money. By dealing directly with the factory, he figures he was able to buy three times as much furniture.

"It's the Third World," Scheer said. "It's a little bit more rough. Everything's not too pretty. And they are sitting there with the shorts and flip-flops, sitting on the ground and weaving all that stuff together."

He remembers the flight took two days, each way. Scheer, who cannot sleep on planes, was awake the whole time.

He arrived back in Sarasota exhausted, having spent both his money and his energy.

"I put myself under a lot of pressure from the beginning," Scheer said. "I had no choice. Now I had to do it."

The furniture arrived on Palm Avenue three weeks before the first Chillounge Night, and Scheer had nobody to help him unload it.

He grabbed a passer-by, and persuaded him to put down his backpack and help unload.

Russell Rodgers, on his way to get some coffee at Marina Jack, instead found a job.

"The truck was already there and nobody was doing anything," Rodgers said. "Rainer was running around pulling his hair out, wondering how he's going to get the truck unloaded. He had to do what he had to do."

Rodgers has worked every Chillounge event since then.

"It's a lot of stress. It has to be," Rodgers said. "You want something done right, you have to put the time in. And he does, just to make sure it goes over.

"And they've all gone over really well. I've had a good time at every one of them, just standing around watching everybody else."

Over the next few months, Scheer will be behind the wheel of his Chrysler quite a bit as he puts together the Orlando show in February, Sarasota a month later and Boca Raton a month after that.

In the meantime, he would be very happy to find someone willing to sublease that Palm Avenue gallery from him.

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